@aescling @Lady am I crazy? I thought they'd what a metaphor was

@aescling so when you think people are speaking metaphorically that means they are saying “her smile was a sunrise” a bunch

@Lady as opposed to?

@aescling as opposed to “speaking metaphorically” meaning telling an invented story which is made to stand in for something real, which was the first option in the poll

@aescling when someone says “X is a metaphor” that means X is a figure of speech like “the mountains were a great maw rising towards the stars”

@Lady if i were feeling very pedantic about it that is what i would say, yes

@aescling you would be wrong since “X is a metaphor” takes a prepositional phrase, “for Y”, which makes no fucking sense with your definition

@Lady i disagree that it necessarily takes a puurepositional phrase

@aescling but you agree it does take one

@Lady huh

@aescling surely you are not arguing “Zelda is a metaphor for how trauma provides an opportunity for white women to confront how the forces which oppress them are necessarily implicated in their own whiteness” is nonsensical or ungrammatical

@Lady i feel like that's not really the best example because X can stand in fur Y in the case where X just is Y lol

@aescling it’s a perfectly fine example because interpreting “metaphor” as “a figure of speech” is clearly nonsensical (Zelda is not a figure of speech), yet the sentence is sensical, therefore that interpretation of metaphor must be the wrong one

@Lady i wouldn't call it a metaphor???? zelda is just About that?????? it's a diffurent thing?????????

@aescling zelda the character not zelda the series

@Lady that's what i thought you were saying, yes

@aescling zelda, the character, is a storytelling device wherein a fictional sequence of events (her character development) stands in for something real, the way in which trauma provides an opportunity for white women to confront how the forces which oppress them are necessarily implicated in their own whiteness

@aescling “a storytelling device wherein something fictional stands in for something real” is what i am arguing a metaphor is

@Lady "media where X literally happens is a metpahor fur X"

@aescling whiteness per se isn’t a concept in Hyrule. there is obvious Hylian supremacy but Hylians come in all shapes and colours. but whiteness is a concept in the real world, and Zelda evokes it so strongly that it's not possible for us to not read her that way. consequently we are able to map things said about the fictional attitudes of Hylian supremacy onto real attitudes of white supremacy. thus one stands as a metaphor for the other.

regardless of whether you agree with the above, my point is that it is a perfectly grammatical thing to say, and, descriptively, provides strong evidence for an argument that a definition of metaphor as “storytelling device” is a correct one

i do not think such strong arguments exist for metaphor as “figure of speech”; i think that definition is, in fact, mostly useless (as “simile” fulfills exactly the same role)

@Lady ok this makes sense to me

@Lady @aescling So I mostly call this an allegory more than a metaphor. (Though I'd believe calling it an "extended metaphor", which implies there's some smaller form that can be a metaphor on its own, which gets a bit wishy-washy.)

@aschmitz @aescling i think allegory is definitely a closely-related term; to me the difference is in how strongly the things are bound

for me an allegory generally relates two very different things, in a way which requires some thinking to map and might not be obvious at first blush. with Plato’s allegory of the cave, “the cave wall” and “sensory perception” are not obviously related things; they are made related through the structures of the story

in contrast, i think a metaphor functions by constructing two things which ARE closely related, and saying “if true for X, then also Y”. (or, i think, it can function that way. i might think allegory is a subtype of metaphor.)

@Lady @aescling Maybe? But I would guess that the references you're drawing in Zelda were not consciously perceived by 90%+ of players, or probably 70%+ of people who thought about the lore more than a few seconds. That doesn't make it wrong, but I don't know that most people would say it's obviously related, either.

@Lady @aschmitz @aescling i’ve always viewed metaphor as the broad umbrella category which includes both similes and allegories and also other things which we haven’t named and therefore just get called metaphor by defauly

@Lady @aschmitz @aescling if someone said “platos cave is a metaphor for how the constructions of society blind us to deeper truths” i might quibble with the second half of their sentence but the first would not even register to me as arguable